Afternoon: therapy with Shelley. Explore an old nightmare figure calling himself the Ghostmaster, who's returned in new nightmares like Praise the Dancing Goons. He wants me to fight for respect. And if I don't, he says he'll beat me up. Is he causing these attacks? It's true I don't seek respect; I act like my dad--an ingratiating clown. But even if I hide my pride, it still won't let me risk rejection or act like a fool--I stick to my zones of competence. Limits growth! Shelley suggests I dream about this proud side and challenge it--date, flirt, play! Indulge my anima Silky--she doesn't mind being seen as a fool.

Evening: finish Liz Tuccillo's comic novel How To Be Single, on New York women hungry for half-decent guys. I find men so unattractive it's a revelation for me. Suspect I'm blind to women who like me--I expect them to have better taste (thanks, Mom).

I start Jonathan Lethem's You Don't Love Me Yet. The LA art/music scene is glitzier and more pretentious than New York's. But love's the same: still hell.

THAT NIGHT

I'm holding an illustrated tome
with scrambled guts--I try a poem,
turn the page to find the end is lost.
Oh. The verse ramps onto the wall!

Pages half a yard wide, horizontal,
pinned heart-high. Dry-sumi style
watercolors patchwork, roughly tile
to form an epic pseudo-scroll
by "the Ezra Pound of Comix" (no,
really, the wall says so!) And hey,
it's a fine museum sobriquet
for this hockneyed thief of Buddhist lore
(who I don't respect much more
than I ever did that Confucian bore:
the Ezra Pound of Pound.)

The painting shows The Hell Cafe. You read
old Asian style, right to left. But in this show
the mostly Western viewers clockwise flow.
Relentless rightward throng! I'm squinched,
jostled along, forced round. And so...

First the Pit yawns. Ruby licks
of flame illume;
Then a tonguelike chute drops bound
mummy-bodies down.
Then the kitchens. Hell-chefs carve
off the tasty bits of live
sinners into stew.
Then the cliff-cafe. Panoramic view!
Down the shimmer-red Abyss.
The hottest place in town is this.
Then closer-ups of diners' haunted eyes,
as they slowly realize
they dine on the diners in line before.
Then the fore-terraces of Hell Cafe
where most diners haven't yet
tasted who their appetizers are.
Then endless files of trendish souls
dressed to filed teeth. Wait for a turn
in the new Scene To Be Seen.
Then all pales to haze--dim stone
staircases rise, til upper right
blues with hints of unfire light.

Impressive enough, even reversed.
But hell is not my thing. Oh,
sure I get it--souls or no,
our bodies end up diced entrees
in the Dog-eat-Dog Cafe.
We end. Death happens. Profound,
undeniable--if unsubtle. Pounded in.

But my ass-backward Western view
seems a plausible parable too:

If you have the guts to buck
all trend, you too can walk
right out of cannibal hell.

For nothing keeps a hungry soul
from freedom but temptation!
Daylight's a far dim beacon,
but glimmers blue, in sight.
Buddha had it almost right! No demon
guards keep the damned in line
save hunger to belong--not dine.

And the sin of pride, that bugaboo
that banished Lucifer to hell,
can paradoxically shoo youup to the light as well.
How? Just proudly, coldly go
against the cellphoned, hellbound flow.

NOTES

Watercolor cartoons of cafes and panoramas: echoes Paul Madonna's All Over Coffee, which I've been reading.

Hockneyed: fuses "hackneyed" (clichéd) and artist David Hockney's big portraits made of grids of Polaroids.

"The Ezra Pound of Comix": I saw a film of Ezra Pound reading. He seemed very Confucian, a patriarch demanding unquestioned deference from wife, kids, interviewers. Quite like this dream-figure haunting me, the Ghostmaster.

Scroll reads right to left but Americans shuffle right: I've been reading translated manga laid out Japanese style, right to left. Disorienting at first. Of course, in the Bush Decade everyone's been shoved relentlessly right by a crowd of culturally clueless Americans...

Lines, restaurant, trendiness: dating hell in New York (How To Be Single) and Los Angeles (You Don't Love Me Yet)